Sunday, January 5, 2014

Eat.Pray.Love.

(Page 121) - It was in a bathtub back in New York, reading Italian words aloud from a dictionary, that i first started mending my soul.  My life had gone to bits and I was so unrecognizable to myself that I probably couldn't have picked me up out of a police lineup. But I felt glimmer of happiness when I started studying Italian, and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt - this is not selfishness, but obligation.  You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being)  to find something beautiful within life, no  matter how slight.
I came to Italy pinched and thin.  I did not know yet what I deserved.  I still maybe don't fully know what I deserve.  But I do know that I have collected myself of late - through the enjoyment of harmless pleasures - into somebody much more intact.  The easiest, most fundamentally humans way to say it is that I have put on weight.  I exist more now than I did four months ago.  I will leave Italy noticeably bigger than when I arrived here.  And I will leave with the hope that the expansion of one person - the magnification of one life - is indeed an act of worth in this world.  Even if that life, just this one time, happens to be nobody's but my own.